When AMD announced the Radeon R9 Fury line-up powered by the "Fiji" GPU with High Bandwidth Memory, I was genuinely very excited to get my hands on this graphics card. The tech sounded great and offered up a lot of potential, and once finally finding an R9 Fury in stock, shelled out nearly $600 for this graphics card. Unfortunately though, thanks to the current state of the Catalyst Linux driver, the R9 Fury on Linux is a gigantic waste for OpenGL workloads. The R9 Fury results only exemplifies the hideous state of AMD's OpenGL support for their Catalyst Linux driver with a NVIDIA graphics card costing $200 less consistently delivering better gaming performance.

When you install a Linux distribution, a set of programs comes along with it. It's easy to add and delete elements of the programs that don't fit your needs, says Meine in his article How to choose the best Linux desktop for you. But what about altering the look and feel?

Following years of waning popularity, the Debian GNU/Linux Project has dropped support for the Sparc architecture, effective immediately.

"As Sparc isn't exactly the most alive architecture anymore," Debian maintainer Joerg Jaspert wrote in a mailing list post last week, "not in [Debian 8.x] jessie and unlikely to be in [Debian 9] stretch, I am going to remove it from the archive this weekend."

The MakerWare I run on Ubuntu works well. I wish they were correctly signing their repositories. Even if I use non-SSL to fetch their key, as their Ubuntu/Debian instructions recommend, it still doesn’t match the packages:

Through the years, I have settled on maintaining my sensitive data in plain-text files that I then encrypt asymmetrically. Although I take care to harden my system and encrypt partitions with LUKS wherever possible, I want to secure my most important data using higher-level tools, thereby lessening dependence on the underlying system configuration. Many powerful tools and utilities exist in this space, but some introduce unacceptable levels of "bloat" in one way or another. Being a minimalist, I have little interest in dealing with GUI applications that slow down my work flow or application-specific solutions (such as browser password vaults) that are applicable only toward a subset of my sensitive data. Working with text files affords greater flexibility over how my data is structured and provides the ability to leverage standard tools I can expect to find most anywhere.

The software that I decided to use is called LidarViewer. It's open source, which means that anyone can use and modify LidarViewer for free as long as they give credit to the creator. LidarViewer is Linux specific. As a Linux user, that made me really happy, but I could only use a Windows machine while at NASA. That meant that I had to create a Linux virtual machine on top of a Windows computer. I had a lot of options for the operating system that I was going to use for the virtual machine.

On July 27, the Google Chrome developers, through Alex Mineer, were excited to announce the promotion of the Google Chrome 45 web browser to the Beta channel for all supported computer operating systems, including Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

xoreos is a FLOSS project aiming to reimplement BioWare's Aurora engine (and derivatives), covering their games starting with Neverwinter Nights and potentially up to Dragon Age II. This post gives a short update on the current progress.

With Mesa quickly finishing up OpenGL 4.0~4.2 support and even some OpenGL 4.5 extensions, more Steam Linux games are becoming playable on the open-source drivers.

Open-source Mesa/Gallium3D driver users into Linux gaming can soon rejoice for another playable title: BioShock Infinite. BioShock Infinite was released for Linux back in March and required OpenGL 4.1~4.2 support, thereby making it off-limits to the Mesa/Gallium3D drivers of the time.

Last week I published the results of a 15-way AMD/NVIDIA GPU comparison for 4K Linux gaming that was centered around the proprietary AMD/NVIDIA graphics drivers. However, if you stick to using open-source Mesa/Gallium3D drivers and are a Linux gamer, here are some benchmark results comparing the open to closed-source driver performance at 3840 x 2160.

OlliOlli is one of the surprise success franchises of the past few years, finding a way to make skateboarding fun again (and in 2D no less). After a successful stint as a PS+ game earlier in the year, publisher Devolver Digital has announced today that OlliOlli2: Welcome to Olliwood will be released for PC, Mac and Linux via Steam, GOG and Humble on August 11 for $14.99.

For most of the year, KDE—one of the largest free and open software communities in the world—works online by email, IRC, forums and mailing lists. Akademy provides all KDE contributors the opportunity to meet in person to foster social bonds, work on concrete technology issues, consider new ideas, and reinforce the innovative, dynamic culture of KDE. Akademy brings together artists, designers, developers, translators, users, writers, sponsors and many other types of KDE contributors to celebrate the achievements of the past year and help determine the direction for the next year. Hands-on sessions offer the opportunity for intense work bringing those plans to reality. The KDE Community welcomes companies building on KDE technology, and those that are looking for opportunities.

There are a lot of interesting developments occurring in the field of Linux smartphones right now. With so many different options popping up, fragmentation is a risk, as apps built on one platform fail to migrate to another. KDE's new offering may help to make those apps available to a broader audience.

I was looking forward to setup a new storage box at home. The biggest two points were about being able to run Fedora, and to be in the cheaper side. After looking at the available hardware prices for the desktops, I thought I should look into something else.

Lava, in partnership with Google, has launched its first Android One smartphone in India, the Pixel V1. Priced at Rs. 11,350, the smartphone will be exclusively available online via Flipkart starting Monday. Lava reveals that the Pixel V1 Android One smartphone will be also available via retail stores in the country.

The LG Gentle Android flip phone is a classic story of old meets new, with the odd twist here being that probably not even your new phone is up to par with this 1999-ish phone’s cutting-edge version of Android.

This clamshell handset with a 3.2-inch screen comes with Lollipop 5.1 installed — making it among the 1 percent of Android devices running Google’s latest iteration of Android.

Razer has confirmed its acquisition of Ouya, maker of the Android-based game console that started as one of Kickstarter's biggest hits before fizzling out when it came to market with few games, limited functionality, and a bad controller. Razer has purchased Ouya's software assets and hired its technical and developer relations teams in order to further work on its own Android TV gaming initiatives, including Forge TV and a version of Cortex designed for Android TV. Polygon reports that the deal includes about over 1,000 games that will be able to run on Razer's device, making the purchase a quick way to prime it with content. The acquisition was made in all cash, according to TechCrunch; Ouya's hardware was not included.

Google is taking steps to make Android phones safer by including a verified boot system that checks for irregularities in the platform code. And device owners will know that their phone or tablet is safe based on startup messages from the system check.

FS tells me that Ars Technica reports that Dice is selling the Slashdot and Sourceforge sites. The company in their second quarter earnings announcements stated they have "not successfully leveraged the Slashdot user base to further Dice's digital recruitment business", and are planning to divest this business.

Step 1 is very clear: Document your event. This way you have shared document that all organizers can refer to as the event progresses. We started with a sample document Kara and Francesca provided. The document is broken down is to several sections and you're free to copy the document and use it to plan your own event. I'll review some of the sections in more detail below.

DreamHost has made a name for itself over the years as being a friendly, yet low-cost hosting provider, offering both shared hosting as well as virtual private servers (VPS). DreamHost is also a major backer of the open source OpenStack cloud platform and now offers the DreamCompute cloud server as well.

Sup peeps. So, after the slog to update Guile's intermediate language, I wanted to land some new optimizations before moving on to the next thing. For years I've been meaning to do some loop optimizations, and I was finally able to land a few of them.

Back in May was the big "VENOM" security vulnerability affect QEMU whereby VM security could be escaped through QEMU's virtual floppy disk drive. In June was a PCNET controller buffer overflow allowing a guest to escape to have host access. Today there's a similar security vulnerability going public about its virtual CD-ROM drive.

Rather than fancy zero-day exploits, or cutting-edge malware, what you mostly need to worry about when it comes to security is using strong, unique passwords on all the sites and services you visit.

You know that. But what’s crazy is that, in 2015, some websites are intentionally disabling a feature that would allow you to use stronger passwords more easily—and many are doing so because they wrongly argue it makes you safer.

Last week I argued that requiring backdoors in strong encryption would result in the effective end of encryption and provide a veritable buffet of sensitive data to both the government and those with malicious intents. Encryption with backdoors is not encryption at all.

In 2004, whilst at Netsight, I started looking at using OpenBSD for routing. We were using big Cisco 5505 switches with Route Switch Modules in to provide routing. The problem was, they soon became quite slow. They were great if you wanted to do very simple routing, and they could do Layer 3 switching in silicon on the linecards. But as soon as you started to do access lists then they had to route the packets on the main CPU. Not only that, but Cisco’s ACL syntax quickly became very cumbersome as you had no way of doing any kind of macros or variables in the language.

The Solus operating system is getting closer to a stable release and its developers are showing off some of the capabilities of the distro, including the boot time, which has got to be the most impressive result out there.

On July 28, Alan Pope, the Community Manager of Ubuntu Engineering at Canonical, published a comprehensive tutorial showing users how easy it is to port online games written in the HTML5 language to the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system that powers several known Ubuntu phone devices.

The Ubuntu Touch platform might not have a lot of apps, but it's making up by having a handy framework that can be used for webapps. In this case, it's about a webapp for the famous wunderground.com weather service.

On July 27, Canonical, the company behind the world's most popular free operating system, Ubuntu Linux, announced on one of their Twitter accounts that they launched a new campaign targeted towards movie directors.

On July 28, Canonical, through Marc Deslauriers, published details about the availability of a new important update for the BIND packages in the Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.

Move over, Ubuntu Touch and Android. There's new competition in town. The KDE community just unveiled Plasma Mobile, a free and open-source mobile operating system.

This is nothing new for the KDE project. Before Ubuntu Touch was ever announced, the KDE community had a long-term vision of convergence. Plasma 5 on the desktop has a “converged shell” that can switch between different interfaces for different device types. KDE even attempted to release tablets with their Plasma software preinstalled, but this never worked out.